Julian Barnes: Literary loner

Glittering career: Julian Barnes has produced a body of work over the past 30 years that is the envy of many writers
10 April 2012

Asked yesterday on the Today programme if he would like to win this year's Man Booker Prize, Julian Barnes was dry as ever. "Well, put it this way," he said, "I've had reasonably long experience of not winning - and I think I've exhausted all the ins and outs of that, so I wouldn't object to a change."

This is the fourth time Barnes has been shortlisted for our most important prize for fiction, so far without winning the jackpot. He came close with Flaubert's Parrot in 1984 (losing out to Anita Brookner), England, England in 1998 (pipped by Ian McEwan), and Arthur & George in 2005 (robbed by John Banville). Only Beryl Bainbridge and William Trevor have been shortlisted more often.

And Barnes minds a lot. Earlier this year, he was awarded the 2011 David Cohen Prize for Literature, a much more seemly affair, given for a lifetime's achievement, with no shortlist and no losers therefore, and he made an acceptance speech which pointedly preferred this quiet honour to the hullabaloo of the Booker. "The measure of a literary award's value lies in its list of previous winners," he began, a pretty broad stroke. "Over the last 18 years the David Cohen Prize has established itself as the greatest honour a British or Irish writer can receive within these islands. It is also conducted with proper secrecy and dignity." So he could accept it, he said, with "sober delight".

The Man Booker delights him less. This time he has declined to take part in any of the preliminary events, leaving the other five contenders to do their best on the eve-of-the-award event on Monday without him. And his resentment dates all the way back to that first snub in the Eighties. In 1987 he wrote a long piece deriding the prize in the London Review of Books, cynically suggesting that if you want to put money on it, you should pay only cursory attention to the books themselves and instead "study the psychology and qualifications of the judges".

After Flaubert's Parrot had failed to win, he revealed, one of the judges had said to him afterwards: "I hadn't even heard of this fellow Flaubert before I read your book. But afterwards I sent out for all his novels in paperback." The prize, given to "some notably minor and incompetent novels", was "beginning to drive people mad", he alleged - giving shortlisted candidates tips on "how to work out just in time that you haven't won", so as to have time "to prepare a generous smile, a quietly amused eyebrow or scornful nostril".

If he had been this peeved by being unsuccessfully shortlisted once, it's not hard to guess his feelings when it happened again and again, however much philosophy and sarcasm he brought to bear. "Novelists," he counselled himself back in 1987, "had better conclude that the only sensible attitude to the Booker is to treat it as posh bingo. It is El Gordo, the Fat One, the sudden jackpot that enriches some plodding Andalusian muleteer." Ouch!

This year, he may well be that fortunate muleteer, since the judges, apparently in pursuit of "readability", have produced a shortlist that's otherwise not so much plodding as lame and spavined. And were the Man Booker to be awarded for overall achievement, which it is not, Barnes would of course deserve it, for he has produced a body of work over the past 30 years that is unlike any other, the best of it, from the eccentric narratives of Flaubert's Parrot and A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, to the faction Arthur & George and his bleak memoir, Nothing To Be Frightened Of, never fully novelistic.Whether his new book, The Sense of an Ending, deserves to be ranked with these is questionable, though.

On the Today programme interview - apparently the first he has given since the death of his wife, the agent Pat Kavanagh, three years ago next Thursday - he explained that it's "the story of a man in late middle age who begins to realise that what he'd always believed about his life, and certain things that had happened in his life, are not in fact the case, so it's a novel which has a reckoning in it". The germ of the book had been "the idea of someone having their life turned upside down at a late stage" more generally, as when people find religion on their deathbed, or, conversely, lose their faith.

The Sense of an Ending is, in fact, an exercise in the dim and unreliable narrator, perhaps inspired by Ford Madox Ford's example in The Good Soldier, to which Barnes wrote an introduction a few years ago, defining its method thus: "The storyteller isn't up to the level of his own story; he is a bumbler obliged to convey an intrigue of operatic passion which he himself only partially understands..."

Our bumbler, Tony Webster, is a mediocrity whose life appears to have been "peaceable", to have passed without much incident. He has worked in arts admin, married a prosaic woman, had a daughter who he doesn't much see, and divorced amicably. He likes local history and tidying his flat.

Then he receives an unexpected letter which ultimately forces him to revise both his memory and understanding of his own past and face up to what he himself actually did and what the dreadful consequences were. Both he and you as the reader only finally grasp the facts in the final pages - and really the only way to appreciate the book is then to go straight back to the start and read it through again in that new light. So although it's only 150 small format pages, "you could say it's a 300-page book", said Barnes slyly.

Compared to the rough joinery of the other books on the shortlist, The Sense of an Ending is undeniably expertly tooled. A long story has been skilfully compressed. The game of knowledge that Barnes likes to play has to be joined on his own terms, flatteringly. And on the whole, the reviews have been enthused by this sophistication. (Not that Barnes professes any respect for reviewers, having snootily said in the past that he regards "newspaper critics as a hurdle of misunderstanding that the book
has to overcome before it reaches its readers".)

However, many readers privately report feeling comprehensively letdown when they do finally grasp the story they are being asked to believe. A single rash letter written decades before has somehow led to a disastrous affair, a suicide and the birth of a handicapped child, unknown until now. Exactly how this has happened is not explained, perhaps because it can't be. It's humanly false.

It also, I think, turns secretly on Barnes's horror of family and the responsibility of carrying on life - "the proposed intergenerational portage", as he sarcastically called it in his book about death, Nothing to be Frightened Of.

There he reported that he had never liked his mother (who had wanted a girl, to be called Josephine) nor enjoyed any intimacy with his father. She was "always present, nattering, organising, fussing, controlling" and never let him be alone with his father. "In all my remembered life, he never told me that he loved me; nor did I reply in kind." He lost "the remnant, or possibility, of religion" when he felt as an adolescent "that God couldn't possibly exist because the notion that He might be watching me while I masturbated was absurd".

What Barnes believes in is cleverness and irony (in the end, the whole of Tony Webster's life has been ironised). These qualities give his writing its great appeal and yet they also limit it. In What Ever Happened to Modernism?, the critic Gabriel Josipovici expressed his frustrations memorably: "Reading Barnes, like reading so many other English writers of his generation ... leaves me feeling that the world has been made smaller and meaner ... The irony which at first made one smile, the precision of language, which was at first so satisfying, the cynicism, which at first was used only to puncture pretension, in the end come to seem like a terrible constriction, a fear of opening oneself up to the world."

Barnes also believed in his marriage to Pat Kavanagh, which survived her affair with Jeanette Winterson being made public. All of his books from Flaubert's Parrot onwards were
dedicated "to" her. The Sense of an Ending, black-edged, is dedicated instead "for Pat", a small change in preposition registering a world of loss.

Next Tuesday, when the Man Booker judges endeavour to make the best of the mess they've made of proceedings this year, they surely will save him from having to prepare the quietly amused eyebrow yet again. And that will be justice - just not for the right book, perhaps.

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